Let's say this simply: Bangkok Cuisine is likely the best Thai restaurant in town.

Overall, the dishes convey the vibrant and beautifully layered flavors that comprise Thai cooking. Some of the dishes are stunning.

There is a “yes, but” here. This place has been upholding the standard of Thai cooking from the time it opened in 2002, with few able to rival the quality of its dishes.

But if San Antonio is on an upward trajectory as a noteworthy dining destination, this place needs to fix its few lapses in execution, and other Thai restaurants need to step up.

Right now, most of the city's Thai restaurants are neighborhood eateries, family businesses that offer mostly lower-priced options with varying degrees of success. Bangkok Cuisine comfortably outclasses them.

The tom kha gai — the well-known soup with coconut milk infused with lemon grass, galangal and kaffir lime leaves that includes slivers of chicken and mushrooms — deftly balances the sharpness of the herbs with the roundness of coconut milk.

Similarly, the pad woon sen, the mixture of stir-fried glass noodles, also beautifully balances the individual flavors of chicken, thinly sliced celery, mushrooms and cabbage, while a bit of garlic and a touch of fish sauce helped tie all the flavors together. The approach comes from Chinese stir-frying, but the flavors are all Thai.

Curiously, the pad thai didn't combine its array of flavors as artfully, lacking the sweet-sour-hot-pungent combination that the best versions of the dish can convey. This tasted more along the lines of the versions offered at other neighborhood places.

The fried fish cakes were skillful demonstrations of the Portuguese influence on Thai cooking, combining the flesh of a white fish with red curry and added aromatics, such as long beans and kaffir lime leaves. A cucumber relish added a contrast in texture and temperature.

Chinese influence on the cuisine comes through vividly in the roasted duck in red curry, which highlighted an aromatic sauce that deftly balanced a slight sweetness and the pungency of a fish sauce and included chunks of pineapple.

This dish sent me scrambling to a Thai cooking reference work to check its authenticity; the combination of pineapple cubes and cherry tomatoes with duck slices goes back nearly 200 years to a wave of Chinese migration into Thailand.

One of the true surprises is a dish called Golden Wings, an appetizer of a deboned chicken wing stuffed with a mixture of glass noodles, minced meat and aromatics that are steamed and then lightly breaded and fried. This is no mere chicken wing; any chicken would be proud to give up its wing for this treatment.

With so many excellent dishes, the near-triumph of the green papaya salad proved a disappointment. Instead of the rustic julienne that's traditional to this dish, these pieces of green papaya looked like they were cut on a spiral cutter. This does make a difference in the texture of the dish, especially when the ingredients are pounded together. The salad, which should balance sweet, sour and salty with the heat as a background, instead allowed the sour and heat to dominate. Just a bit more palm sugar and fish sauce would have rendered a good dish much better.

Perhaps the one true misstep came in the coconut ice cream. It tasted as though it included heavy cream, along with coconut milk, and the coconut flavor was muted.

Service is efficient, and servers try to answer questions and make recommendations to help guests enjoy their venture into Thai cuisine.

Overall, dishes here range from good to exceptional, while the ambiance of a casually decorated strip mall setting proves more than adequate for business lunches and takeout items. But it's not a relaxing experience that makes diners want to linger. Sure enough, one recent Saturday night, only a few tables were filled, but the flow of takeout orders was nearly constant.

Even the best Thai places in town could use some tweaking, but the issue is bigger than that. Our city needs restaurateurs and investors to create an atmosphere and service level that demonstrates how Thai cuisine can anchor a truly excellent dining experience. That also requires us, as diners, to support their efforts.